ICICI bank to extend work-from-home facility to men

MUMBAI: After allowing its women employees to work part-time or from home, ICICI Bank, the country’s largest private bank, plans to extend the facility to its male employees.

“Currently, we have about 150200 women members who are on board with our work-from-home policy. We plan to scale it up to 500 to 700-plus by the middle of the year. Once we have that reasonable number, we will launch the scheme for male employees. This should be done by October,” TK Srirang, senior general manager and head, human resources at ICICI Bank, told HT.

In March this year, the bank launched its iWork@home initiative to help women employees, under which they can work from home for up to a year.

ICICI Bank is the only bank in India that has a written policy for working from home.

This policy helps save on costs per employee on the operations side, including office space, electricity, telephone, infrastructure etc, according to analysts.

Moorthy Uppaluri, CEO, Randstad India, an HR consultancy firm, said, “This definitely helps reduce costs. Work-from-home can help reduce attrition by providing more flexibility. It is a win-win for companies and employees.”

However, the bank does not look at it that way. “Say, a male colleague’s son is in tenth grade and he wants to coach his child... We encourage this part-time policy as it is a critical life stage requirement,” Srirang said.